St. Thomas’ Parish at Dupont Circle
Archive for September, 2009
My letter to Rush Limbaugh
Sep 14th
Because you are in a position to influence public perception, I urge you to tell the truth about the need for health-care reform in our country. While we may disagree on the details of the solution, claiming there is no need for reform ignores the stories of millions of Americans hurt by our current health-care system.
I believe that quality health care is a human right not a privilege for only the fortunate. “We the people” need to stand up not just for ourselves but for those who do not have the same health care benefits we do. Besides, without reform there will come a time when most of us will not have available the health care we need.
The major proposals for health-care reform ensure that all people have access to affordable care, either through an employer-based plan or through subsidies to buy insurance in an exchange marketplace.
To say as you have done that “there is no need for health care reform” is to turn a blind eye to those less fortunate than ourselves. “We the people” ARE the government of the United States of America, and we all should be proud to live in a nation which chooses to care not just for the majority in power, but for all of those who live in our land.
Democracy should not be administered according to the vagaries of the marketplace; for we are only as strong as the least fortunate among us. This means that I cannot act just for the benefit of myself; “we the people” have an obligation that comes with our freedom to share our bounty for the sake of the common good. Anything less is an insult to our shared human dignity, and should be beneath what is acceptable to any proud American, however fortunate or humble.
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We live in the middle
Sep 8th
I must admit that I’ve been quite taken aback by the conservative, indeed reactionary uproar over Barack Obama’s “Back to School Event” remarks scheduled for later today in Arlington, VA. What’s happened when we have public school parents who are indignant over the very prospects of their children’s President advising them to “get to work at school – it’s for you and America”?
Is there now nothing that anyone tending to the right or to the left can say that isn’t perceived by the other as partisan, toxic, noxious? Eugene Robinson in today’s Washington Post reflects on the same loss in the debate about health, “A Middle Ground Gone Missing“.
It’s hard to remember that as recent as five years ago Time magazine could still plausibly editorialize that supposed deep divisions in American society were mere myths.
I had come to expect that when Episcopalians, and then Lutherans, took actions that were actually inclusive of GLBT clergy candidates for ordination, there would be an outcry. Or that when Sarah Palin tweeted the liberals would hoot.
But when the President can’t speak to school children without ‘the opposition’ (i.e. those who didn’t vote for him) refusing to let them listen lest they be corrupted by his contrary points of view, I have to admit there’s a likely prospect that our divisions are not only deeper than we imagined, but deepening at a rate that should concern us all.
Yet we don’t live ‘on the fringe’ but ‘in the middle’ — we expect people to drive on the right side of the road, and shop in the same grocery stores, and work in the same offices, no matter what their political views. This week, however, we’ve been given an ugly glimpse of a society where monotone politics determines everything.
Let’s choose not to go there.
